The Mummy

By Riccardo Stephens

Dr. Armiston, middle-aged bachelor and general practitioner, has his quiet and routine life interrupted when he is called in to consult on the deaths of two young men. One case seems to be a tragic accident, the other the result of natural causes, but they have one strange thing in common: the presence of the same ancient Egyptian mummy case in both men's homes. When Armiston learns that the sarcophagus is inscribed with a terrible curse promising vengeance on anyone who disturbs the mummy's repose, and as the series of deaths continues, the doctor will risk his own life to unravel the mystery and find out whether the mummy - or something or someone else - is responsible.

 As Mark Valentine argues in his new introduction to this edition, Riccardo Stephens's exceedingly scarce The Mummy (1912) is a fine piece of storytelling, an inventive weird mystery that bears comparison with the works of Conan Doyle and Robert Louis Stevenson. This edition follows the text of the 1923 Hutchinson edition.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Valancourt Books
• Release date: Nov 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9781943910298

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http://www.valancourtbooks.com

INTRODUCTION

Dr. Riccardo Stephens was the author of a handful of books in the late Victorian and Edwardian period that deserve to stand with the macabre work of Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Machen. They have the same dark verve, sinister atmosphere, and strange, imaginative plots. It is a mystery why he is not better known in the field of the fantastic in literature. Although some of his books were issued by the relatively minor publisher Bliss, Sands & Co., others came out from established houses such as John Murray or Blackwood & Sons, and his last and most remarkable was first published by Eveleigh Nash, who successfully promoted similar writings in the supernatural fiction field by Algernon Blackwood and William Hope Hodgson.

Very little biographical information about Riccardo Stephens appears to have survived. He seems to be the Riccardo Britton Stephens born on 28 February 1860 in St. Austell, Cornwall and baptised on 29 July 1860 at the Wesleyan Methodist Chapel, Croy­don, Surrey. Our best source about him is a note in Lyra Celtica, An Anthology of Representative Celtic Poetry (1896), edited by Elizabeth Sharp, and with an introduction and notes by William Sharp, to which Stephens contributed three poems, Witch Margaret; A Ballad; and Hell’s Piper: these seem to be among his earliest writings in book form. This tells us:

Dr. Stephens is a Cornishman settled in Edinburgh, where he practises as a physician. He has not, as yet, published any of his poems in book form; but, none the less, has won (if necessarily, as yet, a limited) reputation by his exceedingly vigorous and individual poems. He has written several Castle Ballads (of which the very striking Hell’s Piper given here is one) – poems suggested by legendary episodes connected with Edinburgh Castle . . . for Dr. Stephens is one of the many workers, thinkers and dreamers who congregate in the settlement founded by Professor Patrick Geddes . . . New Edinburgh, as University Hall is sometimes called, an apt name in more ways than one. Dr. Stephens is a poet of marked originality, and his work has all the Celtic fire and fervour, with much of that sombre gloom which is held to be characteristically Cornish. Hell’s Piper has lines in it of Dantesque vigour, as those which depict, among the shackled earthquakes, the reeking halls of Hell, and the torture-wrought denizens of that Inferno. The Phantom Piper will never be forgotten by any one who has once read and been thrilled by this highly-imaginative poem.

Patrick Geddes was a leading figure in Edinburgh in the last two decades of the 19th century, and it seems that Stephens was a keen and loyal member of the circle of artists, writers, teachers and others around him. Influenced by the Celtic Revival led by Yeats and others in Ireland, Geddes wanted to see what was termed a Scots Renascence, and to create a new educational and cultural quarter in Edinburgh. A man of prodigious energy and vision, he set up courses in the arts and sciences and gathered disciples at his foundation University Hall (distinct from the University itself), a community of students from different academic disciplines living together and co-operating with one another.

Riccardo Stephens, together with his friend, the future Antarctic explorer William Speirs Bruce, lived in University Hall around the period 1888-1891. Stephens was also involved with the Old Edinburgh School of Art founded by Patrick Geddes in 1892, and with Geddes’ quarterly journal The Evergreen (1895-6).

He evidently first practised medicine in Edinburgh, but by 1908 The British Medical Journal referred to him as a doctor in Sutherland, in the far north of Scotland, on the Atlantic and North Sea coasts. It quoted an incident from his novel The Eddy (1908) as an example of the lack of security of tenure for doctors working for Poor Law Committees in the country, who could be dismissed at the whim of parish authorities. We also know that Stephens was commissioned as a Captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps during the First World War, and his appointment was gazetted on 20 April 1915: but after that he disappears from view until his death was recorded in December 1923 in Salisbury, Wiltshire. Probably more will become known about him as interest in his powerful fiction rises, but at present the mysteries around him seem strangely to complement his work. However, clearly, like Arthur Conan Doyle, another Scottish doctor, he mingled his medical duties with writing. He was the author of seven volumes of fiction as well as poems, stories for periodicals, and at least one play.

Dr. Stephens seems also to have been the author of two pamphlets published by the Sunday School Union: Your Health and How to Keep It – For Boys and Others (1897) and When a Boy Smokes (1898, reprinted from Young England). At first glance these seem to fit oddly with his literary work. But there are indications that Stephens came from a staunch Methodist background in Cornwall, so possibly he continued to have connections with the church and produced these out of a sense of duty to his earlier faith.

However, his lasting writing was in the dark fantastic. The note in Lyra Celtica praises Stephens’ sombre gloom and this was indeed evident in his poems. Witch Margaret, for example, tells of the immolation of a witch burnt at the stake in Edinburgh: . . . her cloak of flame and smoke/The winter air shall fill;/For they must burn Witch Margaret/Upon the Castle Hill: and it also dwells upon the tortures she suffered beforehand: Upon her body, all in black,/Fell down her red-gold hair;/All bruised and bleeding from the rack/Her writhen arms hung bare;/Red blood dripped all along her track,/Red blood seemed in the air.

Stephens’ first novel certainly reinforced his reputation as an adept in the art of the macabre. The Cruciform Mark – The Strange Story of Richard Tregenna, Bachelor of Medicine (Univ. Edin.) (1896) is written under the unmistakeable influence of Robert Louis Stevenson, particularly his Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), which has rightly been described as taking place in a London very like Edinburgh. The setting and characters of Stephens’ book clearly draw on the author’s own background as a medical student in Edinburgh and in particular the Geddes circles.

The narrator investigates reports of apparent suicides or mysterious deaths amongst young male students and staff at the university. It gradually becomes apparent that there is a link between them, which leads to a young woman who has mesmeric powers. In Machen’s The Great God Pan (1894), Helen Vaughan, the daughter of Pan, under the name of Mrs. Beaumont, drives gentlemen to their doom through the unspeakable terrors she reveals: Miss Verney, in Stephens’ novel is a similar femme fatale whose very stare, cold, beautiful yet hideous conjures up undreamt of horrors. The theme is not unlike Michael Arlen’s later dark thriller Hell! said the Duchess (1934, also available from Valancourt).

His next book, Mr. Peters (1897), opens with the lynching of an innocent foreigner in an American wild west settlement. But it soon shifts to an Edinburgh boarding house some years later, where Mr. Peters, tall, swarthy, dark-eyed and with a sphinx-like calm arrives and flurries the housekeeper with his exotic ways and graces. We soon know that Mr. Peters has a mission: he is the son of the victim and has been raised with revenge in mind. The story of his stalking of his quarry, whose traces he has followed to Scotland, is oddly intermingled with scenes of romantic interest and light humour. The tale is assured and full of lively characters but lacks the sinister power of his earlier novel.

However, Stephens’ subsequent work, The Prince and the Undertaker, and What They Undertook (Sands & Co., 1898), marked another change in style and theme. It is an extravagant episodic romance which probably owes something to Stevenson’s The Suicide Club (1878, collected in his New Arabian Nights, 1882). Like that story, it has a prince in exile, although Stephens’ character is in poverty, unlike the opulent Prince Florizel of Bohemia. The tone is equally jaunty, however, and both princes become involved with a series of colourful characters in the stranger quarters of London. They also both encounter a young man intent on taking his own life and save them from their dark journey by pursuing curious and fantastical adventures. In Stephens’ book this takes the form of a series of conversations with piquant individuals each with a tale to tell: the Undertaker, the Barber, the General, the Musician, the Physician, the Artist and finally the Young Man (the Prince himself).

However, Stephens’ book also has a particular origin in what I have called the Jacobite Sunset, the revival of interest in restoring the House of Stuart to the throne of England that gathered impetus in the last years of the nineteenth century. It was thought that the anticipated ending of the ageing Queen Victoria’s reign, together with doubts about the suitability of her son, Edward, might prove auspicious for an attempt to regain the throne for the Old Cause. Amongst the adherents to this romantic idea were many literary figures of the Eighteen Nineties, including the pale poet Lionel Johnson, Baron Corvo, and the ritual magician Macgregor Mathers, a founder of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The movement also had devotees amongst Scottish nationalist circles, including some in the Geddes communities, where Stephens probably encountered it. But this conspiracy is diverted in his book into another plot involving subterfuge and disguise, with the Prince proving to be a loyal friend and subject.

Two volumes of romantic commercial fiction were also issued around this time: Mrs. De la Rue Smythe (Bliss, Sands, & Co., 1898) is a series of brief humorous sketches depicting dialogues between the narrator, Dr. Tregenna (a Cornish name) and the eponymous lady, a cosmopolitan hostess with decided opinions. There is a sort of mild sub-Wildean ambience to the volume and the pieces were probably written in response to the success of E. F. Benson’s Dodo: A Detail of the Day (1893) and Anthony Hope’s The Dolly Dialogues (1894), which had offered similar light society banter.

The Wooing of Grey Eyes (John Murray, 1901), a novella collected with seven short stories or sketches, is a stormy romantic melodrama. The narrator, Jim Dalrymple, a breezy 27 year old, is told he has inherited Hawksheugh, a house on a cliff edge in remote country (probably based on Sutherland). He finds the place desolate and bleak, with the wind whistling through the keyholes and windows, and the sea moaning below. The estate itself is bare and grey, and there is a surly, saturnine gamekeeper. Everything seems set up for another study in the macabre, but although there is certainly a Gothic mood, the story is about his love for a young woman he meets while out walking, who holds a secret that will affect his happiness. A twist ending leads to a tumultuous finale.

The book is of interest for confirming a decided trait in Stephens’ work towards concealed information, the revelation that all is not what it seems. This is partly of course an artful literary device, but may also suggest something in his own character or biography that is still yet to become apparent. One image that recurs in his books is that of a woman’s pale and haunting face. Stephens is an inventive writer with an exuberant imagination and this repeated motif is therefore not due to a limited palette: it is hard to avoid the suspicion that the eerie, hovering vision had some personal significance for him.

The Mummy (1912) was his last published book, and is here presented from the later Hutchinson edition of 1923. That was almost certainly produced to capitalise on the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922 by the Earl of Carnarvon’s expedition led by Howard Carter, in order to gain from the fervent popular interest in Egyptology that this inspired.

There had already been many other literary explorations of the Mummy theme. The archaeologist E. A. Wallis-Budge had published his study The Mummy: Chapters on Egyptian Funereal Archaeology in 1893. The Mummy, a comedy by George Day and Allan Reed, in which a pharaoh is brought to life again using a galvanising battery invented by an eccentric professor, was staged in London and on Broadway in 1896. Theo Douglas’ fantasy Iras: A Mystery, in which an Egyptologist is haunted by the spirit of a mummy he has excavated, was published in the same year as the play.

There was a perennial interest in Egyptian themes among readers, especially in plots connected with magic and the occult. Guy Boothby scored a great success with his Pharos, The Egyptian (1899), about a modern magician who is a reincarnation or survival in some form of an ancient mummified sorcerer. The rebirth of ancient Egyptians in modern times is also the theme of The Mummy and Miss Nitocris: A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension (1906) by George Griffiths, the author of scientific romances. In Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903), the spirits of an Egyptian witch-queen and her cat (both of whom were mummified) assail an Egyptologist as part of the sorceress’s attempt to be revived in the 20th century.

Mummies were not only deployed in supernatural fiction but also in stories involving ingenious crimes. In Arthur Machen’s The Three Impostors (1895), a character (based on a former employer, the proprietor of Walford’s Antiquarian journal, with whom he did not get on) is despatched by being mummified. And R. Austin Freeman’s The Eye of Osiris (1911), featuring his detective Dr. Thorn­dyke, was one of the most successful crime novels to make use of the sinister allure of the Egyptian relic and its potential for disposing of oblivious victims.

One of the strengths of Riccardo Stephens’ novel is that he presents a set of engaging and picturesque characters from bohemian circles who have their own interest quite apart from the sinister influence of the mummy: he also has the confidence to remove some of them from the scene. He is skilful in building up the baleful atmosphere surrounding the mummy with considerable power and pace, and also attempts an audacious piece of misdirection in the plot. This may not quite convince us, but together with the strong characters and the taut tension it suggests a bold, adventurous author determined to go his own way. The Mummy was certainly a fitting conclusion to the literary career of a master storyteller and mysteriously lost figure who should now at last gain the keen readership he is due.

Mark Valentine

August 2015

Mark Valentine is the author of several collections of short fiction and has published biographies of Arthur Machen and Sarban. He is the editor of Wormwood, a journal of the literature of the fantastic, supernatural, and decadent, and has previously written the introductions to editions of Walter de la Mare, Robert Louis Stevenson, L. P. Hartley, and others, and has introduced John Davidson’s novel Earl Lavender (1895), Claude Houghton’s This Was Ivor Trent (1935), Oliver Onions’s The Hand of Kornelius Voyt (1939), and other novels, for Valancourt Books.

CHAPTER I

I AM CALLED IN

I was sitting at breakfast one February morning, about nine o’clock, two years ago, with Mudge, my servant, ex-sergeant of Marines, at my back telling some yarn about what he said he had done at Ladysmith.

Though I live in the West End, it is only in a little flat over a grocer’s shop, in a small side-street off Piccadilly, where my patients are principally the servants (and principally the men-servants—butlers, coachmen and such-like) from the big houses and clubs.

A couple of news-boys began yelling something through the morning fog, about exclusive information and special edition of the Daily Tale. I knew nothing would satisfy Mudge till he got a copy. So I sent him out.

Presently the outer door was pushed open, and a man’s voice asked loudly whether the doctor was in.

Second door right-hand side of lobby, I shouted, and the man was in before I could swallow another mouthful.

He was a well-set-up young fellow, and well dressed. But I noticed he had no gloves on, and he was looking considerably upset.

Sorry to come in on you like this, he said, but there has been a sudden death in Albany—a man I know—and I want you to come round at once.

Poor fellow, I said, leaving the paper-knife to mark my place in the magazine. Are you sure he’s dead?

I’m afraid there’s no doubt about it.

Poor fellow, I said again. If he’s dead, I may as well finish my breakfast, and I took another mouthful.

You damned cold-blooded cormorant, said the young fellow very angrily. Will you come or won’t you?

Not unless you want me, I assured him, but I’m ready if you are, and I turned into the lobby for a hat, munching the last of my breakfast. Of course I didn’t mind his remarks, for though my comment was quite logical and reasonable, his sentiment was natural enough. I took a fancy to the young fellow at once. I made for the door, patting my hip-pocket, to make sure that my hypodermic case was there. It is an old servant, and reminds me of a good many queer things if I sit down to overhaul it. But the queerest had not happened when I felt it in my hip-pocket that raw February morning.

A taxi-cab was at the street door, and there was hardly time to ask any questions as we went. Maxwell, as he told me his name was, said that he and another man had gone round to breakfast at the Albany, and had found their host lying on the ground.

Poor Scrymgeour’s man Seymour, he said, knew you and gave me your address.

It seemed futile to ask questions when I was about to see for myself, and Maxwell did not appear to be a talkative man. We sat quiet, and in a few minutes went up a stair of the Albany and knocked at A 14.

If you know the Albany you may remember that at the foot of this stair there is a very badly-lighted corner. Just as we turned that we almost ran against a woman who had either just come down, or had come along the corridor beyond.

These Albany suites consist mostly of dining-room, bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen, and a pigeon-hole for a servant. The three first are en suite, and also each opens into the hall or lobby. Seymour took us straight to the bedroom from the outer door. Entering, one faced a high carved mantelpiece over the fire; and above the mantelpiece was the half-length portrait of a man in the dress of Charles the Second’s time.

On the ground lay wooden steps, of the sort one uses to reach high book-shelves. One side was twisted and broken. On the hearth a big, heavy man lay, his head turned a little over his shoulder, his face half-hidden. It was easy to see before handling him, that his neck must be broken, and when I touched him I found he was not only dead, but cold. He was in evening-dress, and his face, the face of a man about thirty, was strikingly like that over the mantelpiece. The resemblance was increased by a small pointed beard, and by the dead man’s hair being just a little longer than most men wear their hair in town nowadays.

A young fellow, whom I judged to be Maxwell’s companion to this projected breakfast, joined us through another door than that by which we had entered, and bowed rather ceremoniously to me, without saying anything.

Your friend is, of course, dead, I said, rising from my knees, and he has been dead several hours.

And will you be so good as to tell us the cause of death? asked the young fellow who had just joined us. His voice was pleasant, though high-pitched, his manner was polite almost to affectation.

A broken neck, I said, vulgarly speaking. More accurately, there is a separation of the cervical vertebrae, and probably complete rupture of the spinal cord.

But would you kindly oblige us with your opinion as to the cause of the broken neck? I hope I am not asking too much.

I looked at the young man, at the body, the steps, and the portrait.

I cannot take the place of the coroner’s jury, you know, I said. The general appearance of things suggests that your friend was using the steps—perhaps examining that portrait—and that the steps broke, and the consequent fall did the mischief.

Quite so. That is what we thought. I am greatly obliged to you for your opinion, said the young man.

But my opinion, I went on, looking at them both with some curiosity, isn’t of the slightest value, except as to the injury. The police must be told at once, and things had better be left exactly as they are until the police come. There will be an inquest.

Is that absolutely necessary? the man called Maxwell asked.

Absolutely, I should think. But the police will tell you, and I turned to leave the room.

Now as I turned I was thinking about the poor fellow on the floor, whose face was, I dare say, a good deal more grave and dignified then than it had been while he was alive; and I was wondering whether I could do anything to make matters easier for his friends, who both seemed a good deal concerned, though they made no fuss.

While thinking, I made absent-mindedly for the nearest door. I heard the two friends say simultaneously, Not that door! but they were too late.

I had pushed it open, and my attention was immediately caught by a queerly-shaped something, half-hidden under a settee.

Thanks, I said, but if I write a note for the police—I know the inspector—it may save you trouble. I can write it here, I suppose? and I walked in, and sat down at the table directly facing the thing that puzzled me. Then I wrote a note, very deliberately, and the composition took me some time, and between the sentences I stared hard at the peculiar object under the settee. Upon my word, the more I looked at it, the more it seemed as though a coffin had been provided before I was called in.

What’s that? I asked at last, pointing to that thing with the pen.

That? It was Maxwell who answered. That’s a mummy case, with a mummy inside. Poor Scrymgeour was interested in such things.

It was my first introduction to the Mummy. I wish it had been my last.

CHAPTER II

CAUGHT IN PASSING

The death of this young Scrymgeour excited a good deal of interest, because he was related to several well-known people, and was himself rather a character. I had to perform a post-mortem examination with another medical man, to make a report thereon, and to appear at the inquest.

The only evidence besides my own was given by the three men whom I had met in the Albany.

Seymour, Scrymgeour’s man, stated that he slept in the house, but on the evening before the death he had gone to see The Merry Widow, had returned late, found the lights out, in the dining-room at any rate, and had retired, to use his own word, without seeing his master. The next morning, when his master’s guests arrived, he went into the bedroom and found the electric light on. He then saw the body lying on the hearthrug, cried out, and the two gentlemen joined him. Later Captain Maxwell went for the doctor, whose name and address he, Seymour, had supplied. He was not a heavy sleeper, but had heard no noise. He would certainly expect to hear a fall, if it happened after he was in his bedroom. The light might be switched on in the bedroom without his being able to notice it from the lobby. He thought the accident had occurred before he returned from the theatre.

The evidence of Maxwell and his friend Perceval was hardly more than corroborative of Seymour’s. Both said they had arranged on the previous evening to breakfast with Scrymgeour. Scrymgeour had seemed quite well and in good spirits. He left the club before they did, about eleven.

I was examined as to my visit and my post-mortem observations. I annoyed an inquisitive juryman, a druggist, by speaking of the dead man as a heavy man, without having weighed the body. Also no one had measured the precise height of the steps, and I declined to give a dogmatic opinion as to the height from which the fall of a man, say thirteen stone, would cause a broken neck. I said a hangman might be able to say, if the information was absolutely necessary.

Then Perceval rose, and asked whether he might be allowed to make a statement, which he thought might be useful in clearing up the matter, and the coroner agreed.

My dead friend, he said, "belonged to an honourable family, and had an amiable weakness. He delighted in genealogy and family histories. He possessed several old family portraits; but his favourite was one of Sir Charles Scrymgeour Scrymgeour, a soldier living in the time of the first and second King Charles.

This hangs in his bedroom over the mantelpiece, and he was fond of showing it to his acquaintances, and of hearing them comment upon the family likeness. I have known him mount the steps already spoken of, and dust the frame of the portrait himself, calling attention to various characteristics in his ancestor’s face. I have thought it possible that he was examining the picture when the steps broke and caused his fall.

The jury, after a certain amount of delay, due, everybody was sure, to the druggist, returned a verdict of death by misadventure, in accordance with the medical evidence.

Curiously enough, the medical man himself was not altogether satisfied. I left the place feeling that the verdict was a common-sense verdict, and sure that the druggist was a bumptious ass. Still, I had noticed one or two things which did not precisely square with the general evidence, although they did not contradict it.

For example, Maxwell and Perceval stated that they went by invitation to